All About Incompetitor’s Accurate Data Tracking Technology

Market research has asserted itself as one of the primary ways of functioning for online businesses. In the grand scope of online retailing, there is so much competition that makes it hard to count a fraction of them, let alone all. It takes a lot of dedication and thoughtful planning to acquire the competitive advantage in a crowded market. Almost by default, market research is also one of the most difficult aspects of running a modern business as there is so much to cover. At least, that the general perception.

Just like wearing sunglasses at night, that perception is plain wrong mainly due to the rapid advancements in technology. Today, we have automated tools that cover a great deal of business spectrum, most notably the competition. These tools make a business owner’s life much easier as they do much of the work and simplify the whole process by streamlining it. One such tool is Intelligence Node’s Incompetitor, a retail analytics software suite that lets you monitor the metrics that matter most to you. In this post, we’ll shed some light (no need for sunglasses yet) on how the tool actually works to give you a better insight into just how much helpful Incompetitor really is.

The process

The story goes like this: we track product movements through our own proprietary Visibility Algorithm. The fancy computer program crawls using competition SKU codes (unique URLs with product code) as one of the many attributes provided. These can be price, product description, color, material, style, pattern and everything the program can use to create matches. Then, based on our proprietary Exact & Similar Match Algorithm (we have a bunch of cool algorithms), we assign scores and define the products as either Exact match or a Similar match. That way, you can compare your products and monitor what products are performing well on competitor websites.

One key note to address here is that, unlike some tracking programs and services, we base our data on multiple points. What this means is that we are able to offer more refined, in-depth analysis and insights by showing actual competitor SKUs apart from selling trends, product launches and assortment gaps which are common stance when it comes to a competitor benchmarking product.

An example of top trending Fashion subcategories in Incompetitor

The volume

There are more than 1 billion products on the web in play here so you’ll understand when we say we have one of the largest global coverage (if not the largest, but we’ll give others the benefit of the doubt) you’ll find. Subsequently, all the products we track come from more than 130,000 brands and are mapped and divided into 1100+ retail categories, all based on our proprietary data clustering and normalization approach. This allows you to survey as much of your competitors as you like without worrying on whether you’ll miss something. There is enough Incompetitor for everyone to go around.

The accuracy

To have any use of such a wide scope of tracking, the data needs to be highly accurate to pay off in the end. Our robust categorization algorithm provides unmatched market benchmarking view with 95%+ accuracy levels. That’s it, no need to explain further. It’s not 100% perfect, but it’s really, really close.

The outcome

Now that we have explained the inner machinations behind our little wonder of technology, all that is left is to highlight the practical points of Incompetitor. Naturally, with an all-encompassing solution that covers millions of products automatically, there’s bound to be lots of benefits too.

All of the data is real-time which means you can react instantly. For instance, let’s say you are tracking Adidas’ Trefoil t-shirt, featuring the company’s iconic logo. Other tracking parameters or attributes would be color, gender, sleeve length (short, obviously), type of fabric and neck, pattern – you get the point. As you can see in the screenshot above, this particular t-shirt is out of stock. Incompetitor then sends you a real-time alert so you can capitalize on the opportunity and optimize visibility of your exact or similar products. The result – you effectively identified a brand-level gap in competition’s catalog, just like that.

The same goes for whenever the competition launches a new item or a whole product line. You get a real-time notification on your dashboard, complete with product description and link to the product. In a nutshell, Incompetitor identifies competitor products that are an exact match to yours or as close as they can get. Through an advanced search of product attributes, you will be able to check real-time prices and discounts for products that are similar to yours. This allows you to discover each and every hottest selling item on your competitor’s online marketplace.

You will also receive a detailed overview of the historic price fluctuations to further study the product’s history and thus help you put together a comprehensive competitive analysis by understanding how competitors perform. In turn, this will yield actionable insights that will help you formulate pricing strategies so you can adequately respond to market conditions and grow your brand’s presence. It’s a scenario where everybody wins. Well, everybody except your competitors but that’s the point, right?

Conclusion

To sum things up – Incompetitor, as the name suggests, is a competitor tracking tool that helps online businesses spot opportunities and market trends to keep them one step ahead. It delivers fast and timely competitor insights concerning pricing, promotion, and catalog movement. Virtual real-time product and price tracking means you can react swiftly to rising opportunities quicker than anyone else.

With one of the world’s largest databanks containing more than a billion of products at its disposal, Incompetitor simplifies retail data analytics thanks to data visualization options that add a whole new level of interactiveness. That way, users are able to strip the competitor’s offerings down to the whatever denominators they want, be the usual ones like the price range or the product specifics like the color (or a combination of them), materials and so on. What you end up with are invaluable insights into your competition that can help you keep on top, where you belong.